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Anesthetize DVD / Blue-Ray
Jun. 12th, 2010 10:17 pmI have to admit I have yet to sit down and watch the DVD in its entirety. I've seen most of it, occasionally only listening instead of watching because I was busy washing the dishes or something.
Anyway, since we're talking about a concert DVD the music is the most important thing anyway, isn't it? And there's absolutely nothing to complain about here. Every band member, plus John Wesley, are brilliant musicians.
The setlist is interesting: The first half is all of the Fear of a Blank Planet album, followed by a short intermission and then not a "best of" part. A bold decision in my opinion, they could've played it save and just performed the usual fan favourites, such as The Sound of Muzak, Trains, or The Start of Something Beautiful. But we've already seen those on their previous DVD release, so we get some less well-known but fantastic songs instead.
Thank you for that, Porcupine Tree. Now, what's the significance of Halo being the only song that appears on both DVDs?
Now let's take a quick look at the video. I've been watching the Blue-Ray mostly (I'd bought a Blue-Ray drive for just this occasion), and only put in the DVD to compare the image quality of the two. The most notable difference between this release and the previous Arriving Somewhere ... one is that this one lacks those post-recording graphic effects that had infested the first DVD. To be quite honest, I believe those were only to cover up the less than ideal quality of the source material.
With this release we get images captured by HD cameras, and the only visual effects we have is the cameramen playing with focus and zoom. One reviewer on amazon pointed out that he'd wished for more long shots to better catch the entire band plus the video projections that run during the songs. He's right, that would've been nice, but then again, there's people out there who prefer to watch each individual musician play their instrument. Maybe some multi-angles could've been introduced here? (Seriously, among my collection of maybe 200 DVDs there's one that I know of that makes use of this feature).
If you're the kind of person who's only really satisfied after finding something to complain about, you'll be happy to find that one camera (front center) vibrated from the resonance of bass and drums and therefore gave off a slightly wiggly picture.
Anyway. The only complaint from me is that this release is a year overdue! This show was recorded in late 2008. Since then we've had a new album, and an entire tour dedicated to that new album. Now we all know Steven Wilson is both a perfectionist and a workaholic, but I feel his priorities were a little off when deciding to get other things done before this one.
Anyway, since we're talking about a concert DVD the music is the most important thing anyway, isn't it? And there's absolutely nothing to complain about here. Every band member, plus John Wesley, are brilliant musicians.
The setlist is interesting: The first half is all of the Fear of a Blank Planet album, followed by a short intermission and then not a "best of" part. A bold decision in my opinion, they could've played it save and just performed the usual fan favourites, such as The Sound of Muzak, Trains, or The Start of Something Beautiful. But we've already seen those on their previous DVD release, so we get some less well-known but fantastic songs instead.
Thank you for that, Porcupine Tree. Now, what's the significance of Halo being the only song that appears on both DVDs?
Now let's take a quick look at the video. I've been watching the Blue-Ray mostly (I'd bought a Blue-Ray drive for just this occasion), and only put in the DVD to compare the image quality of the two. The most notable difference between this release and the previous Arriving Somewhere ... one is that this one lacks those post-recording graphic effects that had infested the first DVD. To be quite honest, I believe those were only to cover up the less than ideal quality of the source material.
With this release we get images captured by HD cameras, and the only visual effects we have is the cameramen playing with focus and zoom. One reviewer on amazon pointed out that he'd wished for more long shots to better catch the entire band plus the video projections that run during the songs. He's right, that would've been nice, but then again, there's people out there who prefer to watch each individual musician play their instrument. Maybe some multi-angles could've been introduced here? (Seriously, among my collection of maybe 200 DVDs there's one that I know of that makes use of this feature).
If you're the kind of person who's only really satisfied after finding something to complain about, you'll be happy to find that one camera (front center) vibrated from the resonance of bass and drums and therefore gave off a slightly wiggly picture.
Anyway. The only complaint from me is that this release is a year overdue! This show was recorded in late 2008. Since then we've had a new album, and an entire tour dedicated to that new album. Now we all know Steven Wilson is both a perfectionist and a workaholic, but I feel his priorities were a little off when deciding to get other things done before this one.
